A Sabbath with Soap

The missus, Dakota and I had a wonderful Easter Weekend. We spent much of Friday evening and Saturday looking for various items for Dakota’s baby needs (rockers, baby wipe warmers and that sort of thing). We also spent time organizing her room and others. I finally got one of our Fibber McGees organized. It looks nice. Also, we took time to hang up various pictures in the library, particularly my framed Oxford Pub Crawl Poster which I purchased in Oxford, England nearly three years ago (Hi, Dr. Y!). I don’t know: there is something slightly Zen about nailing a poster of Oxford pubs up during Easter. Ya know watta mean?

We were planning to attend Fellowship’s 8:30am Sunrise Easter Service but the morning flurries suggested that Fellowship probably would have that service in doors. Therefore, we decided to give ourselves an extra hour of sleep and go to the 10am service. Again, it’s quiet interesting to decide to SLEEP-IN on Easter morning.

Not that I didn’t work. I had to be there around 9am to work. Oh, yes! We were quite busy that morning. Most churches are rather busy on Easter Sunday. Even more so for Fellowship. Filled to the brim. Work, work, work. I guess being in a ministerial family I learned early on that a Sabbath rest on Sunday did not apply to ministers even in conservative churches. It will never cease to amaze me when “Bible-believing” conservative Christians will walk up to another Christian and tell him or her that they should not be working or exerting on the Sabbath. ... Have they not read the NT? Or is that a silly question? Nah, I’m not going to soapbox my Sabbath issues; I have other soap to sell.

Regardless, the Fellowship Easter Service that we attended was very good. Pastor Young gave a good evangelistic message. I suppose with all the family members visiting church members and all the “once-a-year” church goers there, an evangelistic sermon is appropriate.

The missus and I invited two friends (who are looking to move to Euless) to the Fellowship service. Both of these individuals are graduated seminary students. I must tell you that they loved the service. They were ecstatic! The missus wanted to tell them they did something special for the Easter service but that wasn’t the case. In fact, the service was somewhat subdued compared with most.

I really wish more seminary students (or more Southern Baptists for that matter) would attend a few services at Fellowship Church. Pastor Ed Young and Fellowship (like Rick Warren and Saddleback) are one of the top ministries in the country to be criticized by evangelicals.

Why shouldn’t they be criticized?

-They have a highly effective ministry
-They are great equippers of pastors and ministers
-They have an extremely high level of Baptisms (from un-churched people and families!)
-They are highly professional
-They are quite loving and merciful
-They are reaching the “lowest” sections of society (“ladies of ill repute” and their “bosses”)
-They are reaching youth at enormous levels
-They use their facilities and resources to assist other ministers and ministries
-They provide deep, mature and hardcore discipleship (those who think it is fluff are ignorant!)
-They are very conservative theologically

And most importantly ...

-They are having tremendous success by using methods that other Christians (who are not having “success”) claim to be ineffective!

It’s this last one which really gets the traditionalists. They believe that only the methods they first learned as children in their culture work and that contemporary methods are not only ineffective but dangerous to Christendom. Therefore, when evidence of the opposite is produced they must claim that Warren and Young “convert people to the Christian by Satan” (cf. Luke 11:14-23).

The irony of the matter is that while many traditionalists look at contemporary churches as bowing to the cultural world, it is actually the traditionalists who are bowing to the cultural world – their own! No, the first way of “doing church” that you experienced is not a method that goes back to the New Testament. It probably goes only as far back as your parent’s generation or, at most, the generation of the oldest person in the church.

The vast majority of those who desire to contemporize the methods of the Church and the spread of the gospel are doing so in order to fulfill the Great Commissions.

Don’t burden the lost world with translatory obstacles. Communicate the Gospel through their culture and not your own.

It’s sort of like trying to disciple people through the Scriptures by first teaching them how to read Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. To translate the Bible into English would be considered bowing to the English cultural world (cf. the Latin Vulgate and the Roman Catholic Church pre-1965).

Do you recall the song, “Gimme that Old Time Religion”? Remember the line, “It was good for Paul and Silas”? Well, here is some news for you: it wasn’t.

Don’t make an “idol” out of your methodological preference.

Now do traditional methods not work? Of course not! If a church has a traditional crowd living in a traditional community then the worse thing a church could do is to contemporize. Hey, I dislike it when particular ministers want to force everyone to contemporize just as much as I dislike attempts to force everyone to traditionalize. That’s just as much of an idolatry as its opposite. Of course, there are far fewer forced contemporizings than forced traditionalizings. Obvious reason for this is that contemporizers often don’t have to force others; they can simply wait patiently for the inevitable. If the Holy Spirit wants it it’s gonna happen.

If you do not believe me, go to a Saturday night service at Fellowship.

Now how about some soap?